a means to an end and everybody's friend
by munrenhallem
Summary: A bunch of short fics based on the 64damn prompts in roughly chronological order, focusing on life after the war for the crew of the Normandy. Next up: Garrus and Shepard raising their kids while Shepard struggles to recover from her PTSD. Sequel to the road back. (Latest chapter bit tough to read w/o line breaks. No time to fix just yet.)
1. 2 am

Warnings for suicidal ideation here, kiddos. Shepard is really not in a good place.

* * *

Shepard stands at the window, pressing the muzzle of a Locust SMG against the bottom of her jaw and staring pensively up at the stars. Her shoulder blades are popped out and close together, like they can fuse together to protect her from the back.

"Nora?" Garrus says, moving quietly like he would towards a frightened animal. He's afraid that if he startles her she'll pull the trigger by accident. She doesn't react much to the sound of his voice, but she relaxes a fraction.

"Garrus," Shepard says on a sigh. "Sorry. It's just that kind of night."

She doesn't move the gun, though.

"You're..." he trails off, clears his throat. "You're thinking about this again?"

"I didn't ever really stop thinking about it," she says with a frown at him. That's good, though, Garrus can work with annoyed Shepard much better than he can suicidal Shepard.

"Do you remember when you found me on Omega?"

"Yeah, of course. You looked like you were a week away from launching yourself into orbit."

"Yeah," he says. "That's kind of what you look like now, Shepard. Come on. Put it down. You've seen how things can change."

"I'm frankly not sure what's the best course of action here," Shepard muses. "On the one hand, if I don't put it down, and I go through with this, then the nightmares will stop and no one will comm me at three am to ask why I didn't try harder on Thessia. I really fucking hate reporters, you know that? But on the other hand, if I do, and I let you hide it or something, then the sex tonight is going to be great and in the morning I can give Henry his meds and laugh at the face he makes. So this could really go either way. Give me a minute here."

"Take all the time you need," Garrus suggests. "I've heard humans can live well into their hundreds now."

"You heard right."

Shepard stares out the window for a few moments longer. Garrus is glad that Jas and Henry are asleep. This is a side of Shepard he hopes their children will never encounter, the cracked-up burnt-down savior of the galaxy that would rather die than have another nightmare. She sets the gun down on the counter and goes to Garrus, where she presses her forehead tightly to his mandible and inhales so sharply it's almost a shout.

"I'm sorry, Garrus," she says. "I don't want to worry you. But sometimes the only way I can cope with wanting to die is to almost make it happen."

"I understand, Shepard."

"I'm Commander fucking Shepard," she says. "I can learn to leave this stuff behind. It's just taking a long fucking time and it's frustrating."

"Come here," he says and then no one does much talking after that. Shepard screams herself awake for the third time in as many nights, and while it shouldn't be a surprise after the last eight years, it's as much a shock as ever. She doesn't scream when the nightmare's over, because it's only involuntary, and Shepard holds her emotions rigidly close like she's allergic to them and the only protection is to lock them in. She rolls against Garrus, still asleep and in a strange hunched position to keep his spurs off the sheets, and listens to Henry's wheezy breathing through the baby monitor.

Seven years since her second death; ten years since the first. Billions of dead and billions of dollars between them. Shepard's third life is shaping up differently than both before, but it seems it'll be no less difficult. She doesn't want to fight anymore. She doesn't want dreams that end in a bang and a flash or silent cold. She had thought for a while after Jas was born that things were improving; she had thought the same thing after Henry, but then he'd been in ICU for nineteen months and she slid right back down into the sticky awfulness. It's like being back in the braces, grunting and straining to stay upright.

She had intended for things to change after she left Marta and Hero, after Kaidan's talk. She had tried for some time, and things did change. Even now she doesn't go for runs longer than Jas can keep up for. She's been thinking about re-enlisting, even, but not in this condition.

"The safety was on," she murmurs to Garrus' back.

"I know," he whispers back. She rolls over to give him a little space, plays with her biotics. Sleep never comes easy. She pulls marbles off the floor up into a tight orbit, lowering them one by one into a spiral and moving them faster. She rams one into another, curving it off at the last second to arc backwards. This is one of the only things that don't make her think of wartime; biotics are clean and natural as breathing, one of the few constants from her childhood. She misses the navy.

"I think I'm going to re-enlist," she whispers. Garrus shifts but doesn't answer. He must have fallen back asleep. She says to him anyway, "Not for a while. But soon. That's who I am, I'm a soldier."

She turns over, dropping the marbles with a quiet clatter on the thin carpeting, and settles herself against Garrus. She has to pull up one leg and fold the other to avoid his spurs, and his carapace cants her torso back at an awkward angle, but she's gotten used to sleeping like this. Jas appears like magic before morning. She mostly stays in her own bed now, but a five year old is old enough to know that screaming means_ stay away_. Jas, of course, is a Shepard and a Vakarian, which is why she goes to the screaming.

"Mama," she says, brilliantly cheerful and obnoxiously loud. Shepard groans. Garrus groans loader. Jas groans even louder than either of them, almost covering the sound of Henry's warbling.

"Jas," Shepard says without taking her face from the pillow.

"Yeah?"

"Is that the baby?"

"Yeah!"

"F-" Shepard cuts herself off, sits up, reaches for Henry just as he starts crying. "Fr...ick," she says. Henry, in Jas' lap at the foot of the bed, is nearly the length of his sister's torso, held up at the waist to compensate for his poor balance. He can even run when he can stay upright, but there's a tumor affecting his motor skills and the doctors won't do the surgery until he's recovered from the last.

"Poor baby," she says, getting out of bed to lift him and Jas at the same time. Garrus watches fondly, far more awake than Shepard, but makes no move to help.

"Thanks for the help, dad," Shepard says, settling Henry on her hip and lightening the strain of Jas' weight on the other side with a gentle pull. "It's much appreciated."

"I figure you could use the activity," he says with a laugh.

"By self," Henry demands, no longer crying. Shepard sets him on the bed. He stands, wobbling. Shepard feels a sting of sympathy, struggling not to take his arms and keep him upright.

"Come on, kid," she says. "Do you want to see EDI today or what?"

"EDI," Henry demands again. He's a lot like Jas that way. A lot like his mother.

"Then you'll have to let me and Daddy get you around for now, alright?"

Henry shrieks, but he doesn't kick when he's lifted, so they both count it a victory. Garrus moves the toddler to his crest, where a turian baby of similar age would still fit inside. Henry curls his fingers round the edge and licks Garrus' face. Garrus grunts in disgust. He's never really gotten over human spit; turians don't have saliva, some avian ancestor's holdover. Shepard snickers.

"Come on," she says. "Time to get Brat and Squint cleaned up."

"Don't call Daddy names," Jas scolds.

"I'm talking about you, kid."

Jas likes baths. Henry doesn't. Shepard wonders when her life narrowed down this much, like going from a full 180 view to looking down a scope. She used to care about things like the fate of species and extinction events. Now she just wants her kid to stop screaming every time his feet touch something mildly cooler than his skin.

"Henry, goddamn it," Shepard says at last. Jas is shivering on the toilet in a towel, hair sticking up straight vertical. Her skinny legs are pockmarked with bruises from careening into the counters. Henry, smaller and squatter, howls when Shepard warms the water. He howls when she cools the water. He howls when the back of his head is dunked, smoothing down the patchy hair that makes him look like an old man. It's the same color as Shepard's and Jas'; he's the lucky one, though. He got the same blue eyes as Garrus. It's kind of eerie, when Garrus plucks him from the sink and they both stare at Shepard mournfully.

"Don't torture the kid," he says. "If he wants to stink, let him stink."

"Stinky," Henry agrees. "No bath."

"You're almost two. You're practically a grown man, Henry."

Henry mumbles several things to himself as he's wrapped in a towel. Shepard understands a little of it; there's a word from a turian nursery rhyme, there's_ car_ and_ mama_ and _EDI_, there's a few things he must have overheard in the last vid from Liara. Most of it is nonsense. Jas is a nonstop chatterbox today while she's dressing. On goes the sweater, out comes a paragraph about the chickens across the street.

"Excited, huh?" Shepard asks as she's wrestling Henry's foot into a sock. He chirps. The doorbell rings. Garrus makes his way to the door with Jas sprinting alongside, invites in Joker and EDI. Shepard follows a few minutes later, holding the wriggling Henry like a football. Joker is on the couch, angled a little towards EDI and also a little around her, like he's ready to throw himself down to protect her from an explosion. EDI isn't in Eva's body anymore, which has long since been broken down for scrap, months before the black box in the Faraday cage was completely unlocked. She has a similar body now, but a little more EDI. She's still got the sexbot look, but her face is more mobile, even more convincing than the old one had been, and she's wearing slacks and a big ugly sweater. She's got another in her lap, which she is quite successfully enticing Jas to wear.

Shepard gives her a look, one eyebrow raised. EDI nods to the shrieking toddler under her arm. Well. Turnabout is fair play. Conversation bounces around the room like a volleyball game-from EDI's quest to gain rightful citizenship despite the Council ban on artificial intelligence to Shepard's first therapy appointment to the funny looking splint on Joker's upper thigh to Henry's last boot cast to Garrus' next visit to Palaven. Shepard moves to the kitchen to feed Jas, closely followed by EDI, who moves quite differently than she did. Her footsteps sound much less tentative. It throws Shepard off.

"So," Shepard says, eyeing the sweater. The stitches are all identical size and shape, almost like they're machine produced. "You have a knitting algorithm now?"

"Yes, of course," EDI says, sounding pleased as she passes a juice box to Jas, now wearing a similar miniature sweater. "I do not sleep. I have quite a lot of time to fill, especially now that Jeff is indisposed."

"Is that what they're calling it now?" Shepard muses. "So he can't-"

She looks down at Jas, bright eyed and sucking on the straw, listening avidly. Shepard decides she doesn't want to know badly enough that she'd ask in front of a small child.

"Will you make me one?" she asks instead. EDI beams. What does she pull out of her handbag in the other room but another sweater? Several cosmetics that look like they'll just slide off her dermis, a three year old bottle of untouched perfume, and a half-eaten candy bar, which EDI hands to Jas and which Shepard snatches away the moment Jas moves it to her mouth. EDI has no way of telling when food's gone off.

Shepard puts the sweater on in delight.

"I'm trying to teach the kids that being alive isn't scary," Shepard says when EDI asks her about finally starting therapy. "They can't feel safe enough to play if ma is always scared witless."

"That's quite reasonable of you," she says. "And very responsible. I am glad to see you living again, Shepard."

"I could say the same to you, you know. You were touch and go for a long time. I don't think I'll ever understand why you were affected, but the geth weren't." Shepard frowns, watching Jas bolt onto a chair and swing her legs, still listening with enormous eyes.

"The geth network is stored within an adaptation of a Faraday cage, which is not very different than what I did, but it protects their individual consciousness to the point that they were affected but at a far lesser degree," EDI says blithely. "I do not think you would be interested in the details of how it works."

"You would be right."

"You see?" EDI says with a smug little grin. "I am learning about conversational preferences. Jeff, for example, does not like to discuss what it was like before I came back. I have curbed my curiosity in response to this."

EDI waits patiently. Shepard sighs and puts her chin in one hand, resting the elbow on her other arm.

"It was scary, EDI. No one really understood the coding in your black box. We didn't know if you'd be you, or if you'd even wake up. We got pretty lucky, as I understand."

"Would you like to the know the odds of the exact occurrence?"

"Not particularly. It worked out."

"Ah. I see. Adjusting parameters. Is this an example of 'what will be, will be'?"

"Yeah, I guess you could say that. Hey, now we're almost even," Shepard says, sparing a slantwise look at Jas. "Now you're one for two."

"One for two on-" EDI pauses, mouthing words. "Ah. Yes. I see. Now all I need to do is save the universe and do it again."

"You really did that already," Shepard says in amusement. She doesn't go into detail, because EDI was there and Jas is in the room. She doesn't want the kids to know more than they have to, right now.

"I am glad that you are around, Shepard," EDI says. "I am glad that you are still here."

Shepard doesn't ask what she means. They both know, and so do Garrus and Joker. Shepard goes back into the living room with EDI, Jas hot on their heels, though she peels off at the last minute to scoop up Henry and cuddle him while looking to see if anyone is paying attention to her show. When no one is, she immediately sets him back on the floor.

Shepard slumps against Garrus, watching EDI and Joker fondly. Joker's sclerae are blue still, something that alarmed Shepard on their first meeting but now is simply a marker that not all things change. His beard is thicker, almost longer than regulations allow. Shepard can close her eyes and it nearly feels like nothing has changed at all. This is one of the good changes, though. EDI is back, after all. She'd woken up a few times, once as the chess piece on the Normandy and screeched static, and once, briefly, in the chassis she's in now. That time had lasted long enough to alert Joker and then set him grieving again. Now, at least, Shepard doesn't feel guilty and Joker isn't bitter.

EDI wants to be seen as a person, by the law, since her crewmates have long seen her as such. Council law still forbids artificial intelligences, but EDI is self-actualized and no one is advocating wiping out the geth. Shepard supposes they all proved their worth in the war and immediately afterward. EDI has a lawyer now, a terrifying woman by name of Jhadav.

"Nice place here, Commander," Joker says while he's carefully contorting himself and his splint around EDI on the couch. "Probably big enough to fit a whole bunch of orphans in here."

Shepard shrugs, sighing theatrically.

"You know, Joker, I did try and start an orphanage, but the Council wouldn't give me a permit."

"Yeah, and why's that?"

"Something about a propensity to use the small as bait," Shepard pauses, meeting Joker's eyes. Neither of them makes a facial expression. Shepard begins to laugh. "Alright, I'm sorry, that was brutal."

"I would think it would be because of your destructive tendencies and poor decision making skills," Joker says. "Y'know, like letting the ship get hijacked while you rescued a hamster."

"Yorick and the hamster are both very dear to me," Shepard protests. Joker looks to Garrus.

"Please don't tell me the husk somehow survived too."

Garrus sighs deeply. Joker groans.

"Does it still scream all the time?"

"Yeah. And it's always watching," Garrus says. "All the goddamn time."

"Oh, man, that's rough."

"_You're_ telling _me_."

"Yeah, well, I'm the one with the-" Joker stops cold at Shepard's dirty look. "-The sprained...thigh."

"Like spaghetti," Jas offers primly from the carpet. "Put it in the sprainer."

"Yeah," Joker says with a slightly wheezy laugh. "I definitely put it in the sprainer."

Shepard's leaking killing intent. Joker shuts his mouth.

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	2. half-life

Prompt: half-life.

* * *

"Let's move," Garrus says while they're flipping through extranet sites to find a gift for Jas' sixth birthday, in the precious few hours the kids are with Liara.

"Okay," Shepard says absently, tapping on the photo of a thickly feathered mask. "Where?"

"Don't you still have that apartment on the Citadel?"

"Yeah."

"What about there?"

"Sure. Pretty view."

"Shepard."

"Yes, darling."

"Look at me."

She does so.

"Your pupils are huge," he says. Shepard shrugs, her gaze drifting slightly overhead and off to the left.

"Sorry," she says. "I'm trying paroxetine now, I guess? I don't really like it. At all. God, this sucks."

Garrus' mandibles pull tight against his face. "Are you sure your psychiatrist knows what he's doing?"

Shepard snickers distantly. "No. Most of the time I think he's making it up." She shakes her head violently, clearing her gaze briefly. "Wow. I am not taking this anymore. I would rather the nightmares."

"You're so high," Garrus says, shaking with suppressed laughter despite his mingled worry and irritation. "Come on, the extranet will still be there later."

Shepard allows herself to be led off the chair, drifting languidly somewhat behind Garrus as he walks through the hallways. They end up on the verandah. Shepard sprawls over her chair once more, legs akimbo off the cushion. Garrus has a chair sent from Palaven, typically prohibitively expensive but the shipping cost had been waived. He's even got a little bottle of one of the few drinks treated with enzymes that can catalyze a switch between levo and dextro molecules. That's one of the things that remains mind-bogglingly expensive, even for the savior of the galaxy, but on occasion Shepard doesn't care to put a price on being able to share a drink with Garrus.

"I could have put myself through university with what that cost," she says dreamily, taking a sip. It doesn't taste particularly good.

"Lucky you didn't have to," he says. "Besides, aren't your, uh, earrings expensive too?"

"Yeah," Shepard says with a long pause. Her head feels like it's packed full of cotton wool. "It's a family thing, I guess. The only way a woman can safeguard herself is to keep her wealth with her...and the easiest way to do that is jewelry."

Shepard ponders on her earrings and the nose ring she hasn't worn in almost twenty years; she's acquired four more ear piercings since she took it out, though, so she counts it as a net gain.

"It's pretty outdated," she continues. "Has been for a couple centuries. But it helps me feel connected to...to the past. Uninterrupted for five thousand years."

Garrus says nothing. Shepard thinks further on her ancestors and her inability to remember words while medicated.

"That's a long time," he says at last.

"Yeah."

"And it's helping you?"

"I guess." Shepard shrugs with one shoulder, groping around on the table for a pair of sunglasses. "My great great...great? I don't know how many. Damn. Grandmother was from a place called Tamil Nadu, like way before there was the Alliance and the Sinostates and everything like that. She was the last one in my family to ever be there. It makes me a little sad."

She doesn't sound any more emotional than she had before, but Garrus doesn't comment on it.

"My clan's always lived in the same place," he offers. "But then, we've been a space people a lot longer than you have."

"Ah," Shepard sighs. "Are we about to reenact the First Contact War?"

"I was under the impression we had done that the other night."

"Yeah," Shepard snickers. "The human came out on top again."

"As I recall, it was a tie."

"Then I guess we're going to need a tiebreaker," Shepard says, bursting into giddy laughter when she's swept up. Garrus isn't much larger than Shepard is, but turian muscles have different connection points and a different density, and he lifts her without apparent effort despite the weight of her cybernetics. Her sense of balance rocks alarmingly even when she presses her forehead up against where his carapace swells outward.

"Sorry," she says. "Cute, but bad idea. Never taking paroxetine again. I'm gonna puke."

Unfortunately for everyone involved, she does. Fortunately, this leads to a shower.

"I did actually want to talk to you about something," Garrus says while they're attempting to dry off.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. My dad sent an email, forwarded it from the turian Councilor."

"Okay," Shepard says, wrapping a towel around herself with such force that it rips and she needs a new one. This has been a distressingly frequent occurrence for the last eighteen hours. She can't quite control herself.

"Palaven Command is thinking about reopening off-planet adoption," Garrus says in the same voice one would use when reading a eulogy. "He wanted us to know first, so that we could try during the probationary period in case it doesn't work out."

"Oh, that's wonderful," Shepard says, peeking out from under her bangs. She needs a haircut badly. "Do you want to?"

"Yes."

"It seemed like the question to ask. Well. Let's."

"Okay," Garrus says, looking both confused and delighted. "Right. I'll go...email my dad."

"Put some clothes on," she hollers after him, nearly losing her balance.

"You can be naked to use the extranet," he shouts back. Shepard doesn't have a response to that. She stands in front of the mirror-only looks at herself briefly, her mother would be proud to know she'd mostly outgrown vanity-to braid her hair back. Pre-war, her hair hadn't reached the tops of her ears. During the war, it had, at most, reached about her nose, when she couldn't find a bobby pin somewhere. Now, a decade later on a colony world with a surprising lack of barbershops, her hair is around her upper back. It's awful. She doubles the braid and pins the end up, the same way she does for Jas' braids. She's got a haircut scheduled for the end of the month when she goes to the Citadel for another Council meeting.

"Ah, Nora, you might want to come out here."

Tying the knot at the waist of her sweatpants, Shepard wanders into the kitchen. She's marginally more clearheaded now. She might even be able to do simple math.

"You only have one sock on," Garrus notes, though he's frowning at the terminal. Shepard shrugs, standing close enough to him to press their sides together. She doesn't think she'll ever take being able to do that for granted.

"Sorry, I know my toes freak you out. What's up?"

"He's...coming here. And he's bringing a kid with him." Garrus clears his throat, an awkward double noise. She hasn't picked up much from the few turians on Eden Prime, but he's picked up a lot from the humans. A turian in human space will never get old, Shepard thinks. "My father, I mean. He's coming to our house. To talk to us in person for the first time in a decade."

"Woah, don't faint on me, big guy," Shepard says in alarm. She's joking, but she does put an arm up, just in case. She's under no illusion that he'll drag her to the ground, one arm or two. "When?"

"With the new transit? Three days."

"Old days it would've taken six hours," Shepard says absently, running her hands over Garrus' back in an effort to ward off a heart attack or something. "But then, old days I had run of the best ship in the Alliance."

Shepard checks the clock over Garrus' shoulder. She gets yogurt from the fridge and dumps half of it into a bowl, stirring it rapidly to smooth out the lumps.

"T minus one, I'm calling it," Shepard says. Garrus still looks a little shell shocked, but he swipes up Jas when she sprints in the back door and swings her in a circle.

"I'm hungry," is, predictably, the first thing out of the kid's mouth, closely followed by, "Is that for me?"

"No, it's for Dad," Shepard says, grinning up at Jas.

"He can't eat it, right?"

Jas knows this from several experiments in her toddlerhood that, on occasion, landed Garrus in the hospital.

"No, I can't, but that means you can't eat mine," Garrus says while he gets his own gross-looking snack.

Liara comes in a moment later, Henry passed out blissfully on her shoulder. His hair, now fully grown in all over his head, is gelled into thin red cornrows.

"What did you do to my son, you animal?" Shepard asks while she gets another plate of yogurt for Liara. Liara isn't on the whole fond of human food, but Shepard hasn't met an alien in her entire life that didn't like yogurt.

"He wanted to be an asari for the day," Liara says, sounding deeply amused. She turns a little demonstrate that the cornrows terminate in tiny points.

"Oh no."

"It should be easy to wash out."

Jas tears ravenously into her bowl of yogurt after inspecting it carefully for lumps. A few moments later, bowl stripped clean, she looks up with beguiling eyes.

"No," Shepard says. "You'll still be hungry at dinner time this way."

"I'm always hungry, mama," Jas points out.

"You're going to eat us out of house and home," Shepard laughs. She doesn't give her more, but she does empathize. She's always hungry, too.

"I can do the thing," Jas crows. Shepard lifts an eyebrow and looks at Liara. She shrugs.

"What thing?"

Imperiously taking her mother and Liara each by a hand and sending Garrus a squinty look until he follows, Jas leads them all into the yard. It's almost as big as the house is, the thick grass shading into sand at the very back. There's no ocean beyond the sand; Shepard wants nothing to do with beaches. Jas stands a few feet away from them in the sand, waiting impatiently to make sure all eyes are on her.

"Ready? Ready?" she asks. "Mama, are you ready? Liara? Daddy? Henry? Ready?"

Henry doesn't move. Shepard puts her hands on her hips to crack her lower back. Jas takes a position like a baseball pitcher, a sport she's never seen played in person.

"Ready?" she repeats, sounding a little nervous. Shepard begins to worry. Jas isn't a nervous child.

"Jas-" Shepard begins, taking a couple of steps forward, just as Jas sneezes and explodes backwards in a burst of biotics, nearly knocking them over with the shockwave.

"Damn," Garrus says, already moving to Jas. Shepard catches her balance, sending Liara a sharp look, though she's immediately begun to calm Henry.

"Jas," Shepard repeats, dropping to her knees beside the sprawled little body. Jas is still skinny-legged with huge joints, pockmarked with bruises all over. She doesn't move. Shepard's heart stops.

"Jasmine," Garrus says, sounding panicked. Jas sneezes again, without the charge this time, and sits up with an ecstatic grin on her face. One of her teeth has been knocked wonky. Shepard drops her head into her hands, breathing hard.

"Jas, don't you ever do something like that without warning someone," she says into her palms. "You could have broken your neck. How on Earth did you learn to do that, you don't have an amp. Oh my god."

Shepard sways sideways against Garrus, listening to Henry's panicked shrieking fade off into senseless muttering.

"Sorry," Jas says, still scintillatingly excited about her surprise. "It's really cool! I wanted to show you. I'm just like you, mama."

"Oh, spirits, let's hope not," Garrus says. "You'll give me a heart attack before I'm forty."

"When I was at school we had a lady come talk to us about the war," Jas says. "She look like Liara but she weren't as nice and she showed us that on the blacktop."

"Why are there asari vanguards visiting a preschool on a human colony?" Shepard asks Liara, looking up from her hands. Liara shrugs, though there's a set to her jaw that says she's going to know in the next half hour.

"Jas," Shepard says, putting a hand on her daughter's shoulder. The bone is narrow and hard, bumping up into her hand. Jas' pulse is hammering. "Please don't try and do biotics until you're a little bigger. Or at least let someone teach you things instead of trying to figure them out yourself."

"I didn't try to, mama, I did."

"You are way too young to be giving the mathematician's answer, kid. Promise me."

"Yeah, yeah. I promise, mama," Jas says, rubbing at the rapidly-forming bruise on her back. Purple and red bloom under the straps of her shirt. "Pretty cool, huh?"

"Yeah, it was pretty cool," Shepard admits. She doesn't know if she's thrilled or horrified that her six year old is a manifested biotic. Shepard was almost nineteen before she manifested anything, but then, she was a latent biotic. (Or so she'd been told, but Shepard is sure she can remember a few things from late childhood that would say otherwise.) "When you were really little I'd carry you around with my biotics."

"I remember," Jas says, which is patently false.

"Should we take her to a doctor?" Garrus wants to know. Shepard shakes her head. If anyone in the galaxy would recognize a concussion before it happens, it would be Shepard. Shepard lifts Jas, who wobbles dangerously for a moment before slumping against her mother and sighing contentedly.

"Can I take a nap?" she asks.

"Sure can, kid."

Jas naps, and that night she falls asleep without any of the usual hours of fussing and baths and stories. Henry needs coddling, but that's nothing new, and he sleeps well enough once he's been patted and cleaned and there's a bottle on his night stand. Shepard backs out of the kids' room, flicking on the night light to put out a soft blue glow as she shuts the door.

Liara and Garrus are in the kitchen, each with a drink. Shepard returns to her iced tea. Her medicinal haze is gone, but now she has a pounding headache. Garrus is staring dead-eyed into dextro coffee. Liara is watching Shepard with a lightness to her expression that makes Shepard nervous.

"Hit me," she says as she sits.

"There is an entire unit of commandos en route to Eden Prime. I could get nothing more out of High Command, but I gather they are worried about a terrorist attack of some kind and the Council felt the commandos would handle it best. I will have more information within a few hours."

"God, I love being friends with the Shadow Broker."

"I'm sure it's a treat," Liara says with a faint smile. She sips her water. "The vanguard was sent to the school specifically to check on Jasmine. From that, I would assume this expected terrorist attack has something to do with you."

"Doesn't it always?" Shepard groans. Liara stays the night, since she isn't often on Eden Prime these days. Shepard dreams she is back in the war, only this run she's one of the civilian refugees. A pistol weighs heavy on her belt without any armor. Biotics don't thrum when she calls. She has only a small gun with half a clip and a terrified tiny Jas on one hip.

They stand under an overpass, Jas' face pressed to Shepard's shoulder, Shepard's back pressed to the crumbling cement of the overpass. A Reaper's points slam down and it howls over and over, crashing through the other side of the overpass and then carrying on towards a city, dimly lit in the dusk. Hundreds appear to have forgotten to pull the blackout shades, or they're too dead to return to do so. After the Reaper has passed but before the ground troops catch up, Shepard runs. Jas is tied at the waist to Shepard's chest with a man's belt, putting more strain on unaugmented muscles but lessening the strain on Shepard's shooting arm. She hasn't been this slow in a decade and a half. She draws the pistol and shoots. The ground troops have caught up.

The pistol is a Raikou with seventeen shots. She begins with nine left. Four husks fall and there is a full horde behind them. She is down to three bullets. Shepard looks down at the tear-streaked face of her toddler daughter, puts the pistol to her head, pulls the trigger. Without pausing to think about it, she puts the gun in her own mouth, and is dead before she can even taste the oil or burn herself on the thermal clip.

Shepard jerks awake without the rawness in her throat from screaming, but with the stiffness of hours of trembling. She rolls over against Garrus, who is still awake reading the news. He touches her hair, careful as always not to scratch.

"Garrus," she says hollowly. "If I was a husk, would you be able to pull the trigger?"

"I don't know," he says. "When we start shooting our allies, war becomes murder. You told me that, about Kaidan. I believe it about you, too. I really don't know if I could, Nora."

"I shot Jas," she mutters. "And then myself. It was-it wasn't good. I heard something like it over a radio at FOB, it haunted me for years. I guess it still is."

"Nora," Garrus murmurs, curving his fingers around the back of her skull when she lifts herself to lean on his chest. "You're here. You're alive. The war is over. Do you want to go look at the kids?"

"No," she says, already drifting back to exhaustion. "I never forget where I am when you're around. I love you."

"I love you, too," he says, but Shepard is asleep. She doesn't dream this time.

Garrus' dad shows up the next afternoon, only a few hours after Liara's left. He must have messaged from the shuttle, an extremely expensive and time-consuming process. Shepard is still in her pajamas. Henry has jam smeared across half his face. Jas got into the medicine cabinet again and she's got makeup all over herself.

"Antarius," Shepard says when she answers the door, somewhat dumbfounded and more than a little terrified. She's only met him twice in the entire time she and Garrus have been together-at Solana's funeral, and then at the five year memorial. "Come on in."

He does so. Garrus freezes, in the middle of applying lipstick to Jas' nose in the same pattern as his paint.

"Dad," he says. "You're, uh, you're early."

"I have important news," Antarius says, looking at the children. Shepard shrugs. She isn't sending them out. They'll only be small for so long. He adds, "And gifts."

Jas bounces to her feet and bounds to stand beside Shepard.

"Gifts?" she says, appreciably demanding. "And why you got the same face as Daddy?"

"Because I am his father," Antarius tells her.

"So my daddad," Jas concludes. Evidently satisfied with this information, she presses, "Gifts."

"For your parents, really," he says, but fishes a datapad, one of the nice ones with extranet access, out of his carry on and hands it to her. Jas examines it closely and scuttles off to the bathroom, leaving the door open so everyone can hear her watching photosynthesis songs.

"Is she typical for a human child?"

"Not really," Garrus says. "They're both their own people."

"Two?"

Henry waddles into view. He's gotten himself covered in toner from the printer somehow. He says nothing to Antarius, but stares at him with eyes the size of moons.

"I see."

"Go sit with Jas, kid," Shepard tells him. Antarius closes the door, setting his bag on the floor.

"I must ask if you're prepared for another child," he says. "I am not entirely sure, from appearances."

"As much as anyone can be," Garrus mutters.

"His name is Vahan," Antarius says. A turian toddler pops his wrinkly little head out of Antarius' carapace. He's no larger than Henry was at six months.

"Vaughn?" Shepard repeats in disbelief.

"No, Vahan."

"It sounds exactly the same."

"I doubt that it is."

"Can I see him?" Garrus asks, sounding much the same as he did at Jas and Henry's births. Shepard is sure they're going to have a long conversation later, but Garrus is already holding the kid (she's already decided he's theirs, if anything ever is) and Antarius is settling himself at the kitchen table and looking at them expectantly.

"What's this about, Antarius?" Shepard wants to know. Vahan curls himself into Garrus' carapace. He's much more comfortable than Shepard would be in this situation. He's even dozing.

"You remember the war's casualty numbers, Commander. We are talking about a situation with the potential for similar numbers, if this isn't handled quickly and carefully."

The turians had had massive casualties themselves, but were not decimated like other races. There was no pre-war civilian population in the galaxy more heavily armed than the turian. Now, everyone carries a gun.

"Insurgents glassed Elysium four days ago," Antarius says, placing his elbows on the table and linking his fingers together in a curiously human gesture. Shepard cocks her head, using the equivalent turian gesture.

"How the fuck did someone glass a planet?" she demands. "And why has no one told me? No, wait, I know why, I'm a civilian with no clearance."

"They're believed to be batarian terrorists seeking revenge for Aratoht. They are using human magnetic field generators with prototypical salarian plasma weaponry expanded upon and used on turian dreadnoughts. These modified dreadnoughts can glass an acre in fifteen seconds of sustained low orbit fire. I do not think I need to clarify the implications of this for either of you."

"Contacts in the Hierarchy, STG, and Alliance Parliament," Shepard says with a groan. "How old are the dreadnoughts? Do we know anything about their scientists? Batarians shouldn't be able to just stick weapons on a ship and call it a plasma beam."

"Quarian techs, I assume, given the level of expertise required. I believe they may be using a modified indoctrination signal-which I would have thought utterly impossible until STG agents had finished cataloguing your Illusive Man's findings. Rather fascinating stuff, the little of it I've seen. This requires a light touch, Commander. We don't know where they're going to hit next. Potentially here. You are a very high-profile target for someone with a grudge."

"And they have plenty of reasons to have a grudge," she says grimly. "Well. Guess it's time to contact the Council about once again being reinstated as a Spectre."

"Dad," Garrus says. "Did you really only come to see your only son so you could give his wife a work assignment?"

"Of course not. You're my son. I wanted to see your family. And Vahan needed a place. I trust no one with him more than I would trust you."

Shepard puts her head in her hands. She's got another headache coming.


	3. lull and storm

Jas is a warm weight against Shepard's sternum. Henry is in one armpit, Vahan's nubby head in the other. She dozes, comfortable and unalarmed. Here on the couch, there are no terrorists and no old memories. There is only the gentle heaviness of her children. Jas isn't crashing around the house knocking things over with her skull, pretending to be Bakara or Wrex or Shiagur or Grunt, depending on the day. Henry isn't struggling to balance his own weight against the pressure in his brain. Vahan isn't having difficulties bonding with a human parent, despite bonding fine with Jas and Henry. They're all just happy.

Garrus takes several photos with his omnitool. Shepard is drooling a lake onto the couch. In the afternoon, she's leaving for the Citadel, and they won't see her in person for nearly three weeks. She and Garrus had said most of their goodbye the previous night; now she's catching up on sleep. The kids seem to think Shepard is a body pillow. It's nice to see. Jas has never been very tolerant of prolonged contact, which had begun the whole biotic-baby-floating thing that Shepard still uses for Henry and even for Vahan. Vahan likes to be held, but not by Shepard, and Henry is too sluggish to protest when he's lifted. He has an appointment with the neurologist not long after Shepard gets on the shuttle. Garrus thinks it'll be nothing new; Henry is two now, and he's been plagued by tumors from Shepard's eezo nodules his entire life. He's only recently begun to really talk, and he still doesn't walk in any way that could be called walking.

Henry is the first to notice that someone is watching-doesn't speak well for Shepard's awareness, until she slits her eyes open further and Garrus knows she's known he was there the whole time. She closes her eyes again, leaving Henry to peep furiously at Garrus until Garrus gives in and picks him up.

"You can use real words now, you might want to practice," Garrus says, going into the kitchen so as not to wake anyone else. It's only eleven in the morning. Shepard has a few hours still.

"Da," Henry says, with great determination. "Food."

"It figures that the only thing my children ever want is food. None of you ever want my company, you just want to be fed." Garrus swings Henry up above his head, hoping for the shrieks of laughter he gets from Jas, but only gets a pissy hiccup. He tucks Henry back against his side and digs around in the levo cupboard, looking for one of the few things that Henry can eat without it being prepared. He doesn't want to wrestle with the blender.

"Fed," Henry repeats. "Plee."

"I know you can say that one."

"Pleeeeee," Henry says, dragging it out. Garrus hadn't thought two year olds could be dicks to make a point.

"Yeah, I know. I'm working on it."

Henry rejects the honey-no great loss, that one's gross-and then the strawberries-that's a pity, Garrus likes those even though he's genuinely allergic to them instead of just not being able to process them. It seems to Garrus that there are very few joys in Henry's life other than sleeping and being carried around.

"Okay, okay, what do you want?"

Turns out, when deciphered from Henry's garbled English words and asari nursery rhyme phrases, what he wants is what he has for breakfast almost every morning: half-chewed peach slices that Jas has gnawed on and then stuffed into his mouth.

"That is disgusting," Garrus tells Henry, lifting him up to look at him face to face, like men. "That is so disgusting."

Unfortunately, it's one of the only things he'll eat. So Garrus has to go and wait for Jas to wake up and tumble onto the floor by accident, then scoop her up before she shrieks in surprise, and bundle her into the kitchen to chew up the peach slices and feed them to Henry. This is great fun for the both of them. Vahan sleeps peacefully on Shepard's chest now, thin rattly whirrs coming from his chest.

"Where did the two of you even come from?" Garrus wants to know. "I wasn't this weird when I was your ages."

"From the sky, probably," Jas says, mouth full of popcorn. Garrus doesn't know where the popcorn is from. He is a terrible father. "Like on a baby shuttle with grandad."

"That's more accurate than you know, Jas."

Shepard groans loudly, then inhales a sharp breath. Garrus whirls around in time to grab her hand before she screams. Her face relaxes; she must have been tired. Shepard rarely actually falls asleep in the daytime, though she'll pretend so she gets a few minutes alone.

"Why does mama do that?" Jas wants to know. She can move surprisingly quietly for a being that sometimes seems more Wrex's kid than Garrus'.

"She's had bad dreams for a while," Garrus says, waiting for a moment to make sure it's over before he goes back into the kitchen. He can still see the couch, anyway. "The war wasn't a good time, J."

"War's bad," Jas agrees solemnly, eating more of the mysterious popcorn. "Do I ever got to be in one?"

"Not if your mother and I can help it."

"What if I'm a soldier?"

"If you're a soldier and there's a war, then yeah, you probably will be in it. But you don't have to become a soldier unless you like to fight. People do for other reasons, but that's a pretty big one to think about."

"Daddy, I'm six," Jas says, pulling a face. "I don't care about reasons. Can you teach me to shoot?"

"Maybe when you're bigger than the gun."

"I'm bigger than one of the small ones."

"Not the kind I shoot," he says, looking Jas over appraisingly. "You got a few years, J. You already gave your mother one minor heart attack."

In the last week and a half, Shepard has been on edge every time Jas sneezes. Nearly one in five times it sets off a biotic charge. Lucky she hasn't torn through a wall and brought the house down, or farted and gone nova. That's Jas all over, though: her mother's charm, her mother's looks, her mother's sheer stupid-minded stubborn luck.

"What if I do it again?" Jas asks speculatively.

"We don't blackmail in this house."

Not until you're much older, he thinks.

"We'll see," he concedes. "Soon. So if you don't want to be a soldier, what do you want to be?"

"President, maybe?" she asks, picking a shell out of her teeth. "And also I want to fly a ship like EDI and then probably I want to buy a hundred planets and put puppy colonies on all of them."

"Don't ever give up your ambition, Jas," Garrus says. "Also, the ship is the Normandy, EDI isn't a ship."

Jas shrugs. She doesn't care much for distinctions. Doesn't know much about shades of grey, and that's just fine by Garrus. He doesn't want her to ever have to learn those kinds of things. His kids can all stay coddled, spoiled small children, and that's not a problem by him.

"How old is Vahan?" she wants to know. She's accepted Vahan more easily than Henry has-not a surprise, really, Henry is stressed out by bathwater changing temperature. She doesn't seem too inclined to make the jump from small cooing pet to sibling, but Garrus is confident that if anyone in the house other than himself is going to love Vahan, it's going to be Jas.

"He's about a year old."

Jas stares at him in incomprehension.

"He's smaller than Henry," Garrus clarifies.

"Oh. Okay. But he's like you, so he can't eat my food?"

"Right."

"Okay. So was I like you when I was smaller than Henry?"

"No, Jas, you've always been human." He wanted to say like Shepard, but Jas has no idea who Shepard is, she's just mom. "So was Henry."

"Okay," Jas says, sounding a little put out. "I'm gonna go lie back down with mama."

"Hey," Garrus says, lifting her when she puts her arms up. He's not going to be able to do that for too much longer, with the way she's growing. "What do you say we see if we can get everyone into your room and all sleep together for once?"

Jas makes a pleased noise. She takes Henry, carrying him much the same way the Garrus does Shepard and Vahan-scooped up, hunched across the back from the weight, with a little bowlegged stagger. Garrus would never tell Shepard that she's nearly too heavy for him, cybernetics and everything, and she almost never allows herself to be carried anywhere, but he likes being able to now and then. Likes being able to take care of the savior of the galaxy instead of the other way around, when she isn't furious because it feels like she's in the hospital. Shepard is obviously awake or nearly so, from the contented sound that sighs from her chest, but Vahan doesn't stir, and Garrus makes it to the bedroom without incident. Jas is a little slower, having to lug Henry's twisting weight without the benefit of military training.

It's a tight fit on the small bed, but they make it work for a few hours. Shepard smells like warmth, like home and Reaper-killer, and Henry smells like sugar. Jas doesn't smell like much of anything other than soap. They all smell soft and vulnerable and familiar, even Vahan, slowly growing into plates and hardness.

Garrus wishes he understood what was wrong with Henry; he saw his mother's sickness, and that ended in misery. He saw his sister's slow descent into fever and inability to climb back out. He sees Shepard, still struggling with her own head. None of it is helping. As a baby, Jasmine had been loud and demanding, true, but also easily delighted, always headstrong and laughing. Henry is no longer a baby, but he's still a miserable howling tyrant. He won't eat and he won't sleep and he's a failure at thriving. It weighs on him, in the little place in his heart that is still, even now, terrified and worried and almost repulsed by the idea of living with humans, always being in their spaces, surrounded by their culture and their people and being an island adrift in a sea of aliens. There are less than one hundred turians on Eden Prime at any given time. There are over half a billion humans.

It doesn't bother him most of the time. He and Shepard are retired somewhere warm, if not necessarily tropical, with a radiation level low enough not to fuck with Shepard. She's his main concern these days. There are no monsters to hunt through the relays, after all. Garrus is a loyal man and not an easily frightened one, but he thinks it might take a heart of stone not to quail at the idea of being hundreds of thousands of miles from home and food you can eat without dextroepinephrine additives and neighbors who aren't from a species whose communication is mostly nonverbal cues you can't read. He's learning, but not fast enough, and Shepard is the only one he can read with any reliability. Humans subconsciously read tone shifts and miniscule muscle movements that make turian body language seem like screaming into a loudspeaker. It's bewildering for a species that isn't exactly subtle.

At least with the move to the Citadel looming he won't be the alien in the neighborhood. They're not following Shepard up there for some time, but it's a nice thought in the interim. So is the idea that Henry and Vahan and Jasmine are growing up in the first generation after the discovery of a new species (not that that's never happened before) and they're in the first generation after the war. This is what they fought for, for the chance for things to grow. This is what Shepard is continuing to fight for, when Garrus knows she wants nothing more than to lay the war to rest and raise her children.

"Come on," he says, when Shepard's omnitool starts to beep and she just yawns at it. "Hey, Nora. Get up."

Shepard's never been a messy waker. She's spent nearly her entire life in and around the military and waking is as easy as stepping out of the shower. She rolls to her feet without dislodging the wall of sleeping small children, landing as light and deft as someone without an extra hundred-odd pounds worth of cybernetic reinforcements.

"Do I have everything packed?" she asks, staring fuzzily into the mid-distance for a few moments before her head clears. "Yeah. Of course I do. Okay. Let's go."

They're all up and moving within the half hour. It's a short shuttle ride to the spaceport, but it seems an eternity with Henry and Vahan both screaming into Shepard's ears. She pats Henry absently on the lower back, away from his latest sutures, and gently rocks them both to either side, but to no avail. Jas doesn't look happy, glumly swinging her legs in the seat beside Garrus and tightly gripping his hand. Garrus and Shepard are hardly smiling themselves, but this kind of parting is nothing new, and at least now they know when she's coming back.

"I'll see you in twenty days," Shepard says to the kids. She waves to Kaidan, visible through the summer heat haze. Jas moves her white-knuckled grip to Shepard's hands, pinching hard enough to white-knuckle Shepard, too.

"Please don't go," she says. Her voice doesn't tremble and Shepard is so proud. "Please-please come back, mama."

"I always come back, don't I?" Shepard asks, looking around at her family, and repeats the question somewhat louder to Kaidan.

"Every time," Kaidan agrees.

"At least as long as I've known you," Garrus says, shrugging.

"So," Shepard says. "You have a whole bunch of proof I'm always coming back, no matter how long it takes me to. You listen to daddy, alright?"

Jas scowls.

"Thought you're s'posed to tell me I'm the man of the house," she says morosely. "I wanna be man of the house."

"You've been watching way too many vids, kid," Garrus says.

"Wow, I wonder where she gets that?"

Henry is howling both before and after the goodbyes. Shepard's ears ring, but that's nothing new. She touches Vahan gently on the forehead, pulls her hand back before he can clasp his teeth in her palm, and adjust the bag on her shoulder. Garrus is the last and the hardest to say goodbye to.

"War is coming again," Shepard murmurs into his ear before stepping back. She doesn't know what's left to fight about-it should have all ended eleven years ago. "Soon."

Shepard makes it onto the shuttle before she drops her head into her hands and groans. This is the only concession she allows for fear and misery before she focuses on the issue at hand. Kaidan looks exhausted, but otherwise no different from the last time she saw him.

"It's been a bit, hasn't it?" she asks.

"Yeah, I guess it has."

They both shift awkwardly.

"Look," Shepard says, exhaling. "I'm sorry I punched you. I'm sorry for throwing you out."

Shepard shifts again, tucking her hands under her legs. "And I'm, uh, I'm sorry for...saying I wish I stayed in a coma."

"I'm sorry for punching you back. And for, you know, not telling you about donating my sperm. Didn't know they'd mix it up," Kaidan scowls and sighs, both self-consciously. "It was kind of embarrassing. It still is. I'm also pretty sorry for saying that you were better off...dead."

"I think we can forgive each other."

"I hope so. I was...pretty drunk. I mean, Elysium."

"So was I," Shepard says humorlessly. "Let's just not ever have that conversation again."

"God, no," Kaidan says vehemently. He pauses, his face softening a little. The exhaustion falls to the wayside. "Do you have any pictures of her?"

"Yeah," Shepard says, keying up her omnitool, and they both hunch in silence over the pictures of Jas.

"You said she charged?"

"Yeah. Sneezed and blew backwards into the dirt. Gave me a coronary."

"Wow. She's incredible."

"Yeah," Shepard says quietly. "You're telling me."

Jas in the images is flat and small. The pictures are blown up twice the size, and the poor quality washes out her scabs and skin to the same blotchy pixellated brown.

"Her hair."

"I know, I don't know where it came from."

"It's so red."

"Yeah, which I thought was a recessive gene. Weirder things have happened, I guess."

"Wow," Kaidan whispers, then, "wow."

Shepard gives him a moment to collect himself. She supposes she can understand. It's not every day a guy finds out that his former superior officer is accidentally the mother of his child, and not even in the fun way. It's definitely not everyday that same guy gets socked so hard in the jaw by his former superior officer that he is knocked flat on his ass and stays unconscious for three hours.

"Lucky I got your six while you're staring out the shuttle window like an idiot," Shepard says casually, leaning back against the seat and putting her elbows up on the top of the cushion. She isn't wearing any armor, which means there's actually enough space to fit her arms up there. "Keeping an eye on you, for once."

Kaidan gets touchy when anyone references his helicopter mom behavior around Shepard. He says it isn't his fault, it's just that she died twice when he wasn't around, so maybe if he sticks around, it won't happen again.

"Don't even," he says, but there's no sting to it. He's still soft around the eyes. Jas doesn't look much like either of them, beyond Shepard's hair and Shepard's nose, but Kaidan says,

"I think she has my eyes."

"I'm not sure," Shepard says with a shrug. She's amused and fond, but more than ready to change the subject. "So. Where are we off to today?"

"Citadel first. You've got an advisory meeting and then I'm supposed to escort you to lunch with some ambassador."

"So I have a meeting and then we're disappearing for three hours."

"Yeah, sounds about right."

The shuttle ride is peaceful as it ever gets with Normandy crew. Nothing explodes, but there is a minor incident with the electrolysis systems. Shepard blames it on a Tuesday and leaves it at that. Citadel security escorts them through back ways carved out of old Keeper tunnels, footsteps rattling off the high ceilings. Shepard pulls her arms in close, wishing for her armor and thankful for the chakram launcher slung across her back. The air is cold and heavy in here. She would rather be out in the crowded Citadel proper, even with the security cordon and the news cams and the tight press of strangers. This is all part and parcel of the process of finding herself again, though, so she forces herself through the chilly empty air and the sting in her nose that feels like the beam up to the Citadel.

She wants Garrus on one side and Javik on the other, armor as heavy as her own body and a clanking stride on the tile. None of this feels right, no matter how often she does it. Shepard is not meant to be a civilian, and definitely not one in fancy clothing that would tear at the first sign of a punch in the chest. Shepard is used to durability, unyieldingness.

The Council meeting is as dead-dull as ever until the last twenty minutes, when human business is finally addressed and Elysium is brought up.

"Who knows how many ships these insurgents may have?"

"With these kinds of capabilities, and what they would cost, I'm thinking not a lot," Kaidan says. Shepard knows he isn't actually supposed to be there, but she likes having his support. "This is all experimental tech, all jammed together. It probably doesn't work very well, either, I don't know."

"We can't bank on that," Shepard says. "I mean, if we get really lucky, we'll find the sorry bastards and their tech will explode and kill them before I have to. But if they're going to glass my goddamn planets, I'm rooting every last one of them out. What do we know?"

"Only what Antarius told you," the turian councilor says.

"I'm going to need to be reinstated again," Shepard says.

"Done."

"Quicker than I expected. Time to get started," Shepard says, getting to her feet.


	4. correspondence

10/11/13-Fixed with line breaks! Thank god. Forgot to fix the formatting from the AO3 to .

* * *

Sometimes it seems like three days is long enough for the universe to blow to pieces when you're gone. That sounds really stupid now that I've typed it out, but this isn't the Normandy. I got spoiled having everyone around all the time. Vidcalls aren't the same thing at all. A picture on a screen won't take my hand when its crossing the street. I still think that's really cute, you know. You're this big badass that eclipses everyone around you and you won't cross the street without holding someone's hand. Is that a human childhood thing? I thought you didn't even grow up on a planet, in which case, where do you pick up something like that?

* * *

Three days is way long enough for the universe to blow to pieces especially when I am involved which is not a reason to tease me and if you mention the fish I will come home and I will kill you after I give you a very thorough hello. Three days is long enough for me to hunt some sorry bastard to this god forsaken planet in the middle of fucking nowhere even in space which is all the middle of fucking nowhere just so I can put a chakram between his eyes and watch his head go up like the Fourth of July. Three days is not very long subjectively when you are as brilliant and as clever as I am that is a joke but also somewhat serious because I missed doing this Garrus this is what I am good at this is what is going to keep me going because I have been waiting and waiting for something to happen but nothing ever does so I am going to hunt down something and blow it up and when I come home we are going to have a very long talk about your lack of knowledge of life on a human ship.

* * *

Typing with Henry in my lap isn't fun. He likes to help with the keys, which surprises me, because I didn't think Henry liked anything. How did we end up with such weird kids? I keep waiting for your terminal to say "this hurts you" when I push the letters and the minute it does I'm launching it into the sun. I see your typing hasn't gotten any better. Nora, when you were a kid, did you not have to go to school? Did you teach yourself English? Is that why you're a digital motormouth? I'm so glad I came with you from C-Sec. If I didn't, I would never know what it's like to share a bed with a bloodthirsty madwoman. Pretend I have my eyes on the back of your vicious little head. You never miss when I have your six.

* * *

You're my old man Vakarian of course I'm going to pretend you're watching my super cool new helmet because this one has runner lights along the edge and they're a real nice teal I think you would appreciate. That is the most juvenile thing I have said since I was fifteen years old and it is once again your fault. We hit insurgents today and fucked around with their files (etc etc I am a wizard with an omnitool this is an accepted fact) and they have a mysterious figure for a leader which means its probably someone I shot in the leg twenty years ago or something who knows maybe its another clone oh god I take that back. If there is a merciful god which I think my life is evidence there is not then it is not another clone. I miss you more every time you email me but at least when I'm out trying to kill the worst of the world then I'm not home strangling you because I had a nightmare and if leaving sometimes is the price of keeping us both safe and alive that is a price I would pay. I would pay any price for that. Give everyone kisses but not the embarrassing kind so no tongue and tell them Commander Mom will see them as soon as she can which frankly is not soon enough and also too soon. It's nice being able to shower alone.

* * *

I didn't mean to take two days to answer you but you know how it is with these little monsters sometimes. Vahan is growing real teeth now-almost three months early, let me tell you-so it's probably a good thing you left when you did. He's been chewing on me. I can't say I've been enjoying it but you'd enjoy it even less. The vid I sent you this morning is Jas attempting swimming, I don't know if you've seen it yet. You know those creepy bugs you showed me in London before the final push, the ones that walked on top of the puddles? That's what she reminds me of. No one warned me that biotic children might choose to skitter over the water instead of in it. She wants me to swim with her, but I said no, on the crazy idea that she might not want to see me drown.

* * *

Come to the Citadel as soon as you can there are ticket vouchers attached please just get here as soon as you can because you're not fucking going to believe this.

* * *

The kids don't make shuttle travel easily. Jas is a pleasure, even when her drive for attention leads to blatantly fake histrionics in the middle of the terminal and it sets off a dozen other children. She can corral Henry and she's big enough to carry him for a bit on her back, one of the only ways he'll consent to move when he isn't drugged up the gills on his meds, while Garrus is trying to balance an extremely active and athletic infant on one side and the various accoutrements of traveling with children on the other side.

"I'm about to strap you three to my chest and sprint down the runway," Garrus says conversationally to Vahan as he waits at the final security check point. He thinks he can see Kaidan out past the airlock, which means Shepard won't be far away, if she's on the Citadel yet. Vahan makes a happy yowling noise, throwing himself to the side and nearly falling out of Garrus' grip. He wants to stick Vahan in his cowl, but then Henry will want to and so will Jas and he wouldn't be surprised if Vahan threw himself out of the cowl, too. He doesn't like to hold still.

"Stroller, Daddy," Jas says, holding Henry tightly to her side with a grip on his upper arm. Henry lolls his head a little. "Should've brought one."

"That's not a bad idea," Garrus says. "Know what we could have put in the bottom of it?"

"Snacks."

"Well, yeah, but what else?"

"...More snacks?"

"Yeah, that too."

"Guns?" Jas asks, tipping her face up. She usually looks sweet and round faced in the vague way that all human children do to Garrus, but now she has a miniaturized version of Shepard's bloodthirsty expression. It's a little unnerving. Jas isn't a violent child. Garrus knows that Shepard doesn't want any of the kids to be overly encouraged into any one field, but he can't help the way he was raised. It seems unnatural not to emphasize duty and service, which they do, but not in the kind of way that would lead to enlistment.

"Yeah," he says. "Don't tell anyone, but I'm wearing four."

"I'm wearing five," Jas says, a little viciously, but then she smiles enormously and like that the aggression is gone. "Six! Because I put one on Henry. I have so many guns, Daddy."

The terminal security doesn't look pleased by the conversation, but the line is moving and they're through the checkpoint. Jas releases Henry and hurls herself at Kaidan, who looks more than a little pole-axed for a moment before swinging her up. Garrus knows he's going to have to have a talk with Kaidan and Shepard at some point and he really isn't looking forward to it. Henry staggers forward a little.

"Kaidan," Garrus says, shaking the man's hand and awkwardly lifting Henry to the side of his torso not balancing bags. Kaidan's grip isn't as tight as it usually is.

"Garrus."

"How've you been?"

"Doing alright. C'mere, I got a skycar. Watch your step, kid, I don't care if you think you can catch yourself. Whoops, up you go. How are you doing? Didn't you see Liara? How's she?"

"Put your shoes back on, Jas."

The highlight of the trip had been Jas taking her shoes off for the x-rays, then wandering through the scanner like a tiny businesswoman while security tried to herd her back through. She puts her shoes back on, hunching over at a weird angle around Henry, then returns to slumping against Kaidan's side. Kaidan tips his torso to make her more comfortable.

"We're fine," Garrus says, counting off heads to make sure no one wandered off. "Liara's doing well. She and Javik have been fighting a lot lately, so she stayed with us a few days. It was pretty nice."

"We should try to get everyone up here."

"I like the idea," Garrus says, pulling Henry onto his lap so he can't wriggle to the ground. "Did Nora tell you we're moving to the Citadel?"

"She mentioned it, yeah. Need help with anything?"

"Just get your sorry ass there, Alenko."

"Haha, yeah, okay, I can do that. You talked to Jacob lately? Shep's birthday is in a few weeks, I guess."

Garrus counts back. Shep Taylor's going to be twelve.

"Haven't spoken to him, but we'll probably have a gift for the kid."

"Yeah, and Wrex has a whole pack by now. We're going to have some killer parties."

Henry wriggles and kicks, still not using his words, until Vahan takes one of his hands and the little monster stills. Human children are so obviously not prey animals. They're loud and weak. Turians hadn't been prey animals in quite a long time, ever as far as anyone can tell, but turian children are quiet and at least smart enough to roll under things if you put them on the floor. That's just plain sense.

"How many does he have?" Kaidan asks, adjusting Jas a little. She's dozing off, not entirely asleep, but with a slackness around her mouth like Shepard does when she's been in the shower too long.

"Dozens," Garrus says.

"Got his own football team, I guess."

"His own biotiball team, probably, too."

"He got biotics?"

"One or two, I think?" Garrus shrugs. "Just by sheer numbers, probably."

"I heard a krogan can lay up to a thousand eggs at once."

"Oh, hell," Garrus says. "That's way too many of the little bastards. The galaxy won't be able to hold that many tiny Wrexes."

Kaidan swings the skycar up against mooring, waiting for the magnets to lock into place, and opens the top. Most places on the Citadel have dedicated parking, but this area of the Presidium has mind-blowing amounts of traffic and all the space is at a premium. The skycars all have to hover over the Presidium and the people in them take ramps down to the Presidium proper. Vahan goes noisily into Garrus' cowl, Kaidan takes Henry, and Jas pinballs between their hands like a dervish. The crush is incredible up here, but the crowd thins the closer they get to Council housing, where the Councilors and their guests stay. Shepard is supposed to be waiting for them there.

"I shouldn't even be back here right now," she says first thing when they all stagger into the apartment, staring at the five of them wild-eyed. She's pacing impatiently, but pauses to swoop down and offers hugs.

"It's good to see you too, honey," Garrus says.

"Hi, baby," Shepard says to Henry, tapping his nose. To Garrus, she retorts, "You really aren't going to believe this. You'll understand why I'm distracted."

Jas tears free of Kaidan's hand, charging across the room like a miniature vanguard and crashing into Shepard. Shepard flings her arms around Jas, lifting her and whirling around a few times, before regaining her balance and setting Jas back on her feet.

"Jas!" Shepard says.

"Mama!" Jas says.

"Does Vahan-" Shepard starts, sees Vahan's tremulous stare over Garrus' cowl, and snaps her mouth shut. "Right."

Shepard looks good, with a haircut and armor buffed out. It's like the last decade's rolled back and she's about to throw a husk off a bridge.

"Can you-" Shepard says to Kaidan, who bustles the kids and their stuff out to a Council-recommended nanny and comes back with the brusque efficiency of a man used to being told what to do and relieved to return to form.

"It's the clone," she says, the minute the door's swung shut and it's the three of them. "She's back. I don't think she ever really went anywhere."

"Of course," Garrus says with a sigh. "It's never Cerberus with you."

Shepard snickers.

"Not at all," she says. "But are you actually surprised?"

"No."

"Get it now, though?"

"Oh, yeah."

Shepard rolls her shoulders, a quick smooth motion that clinks her guns together. She pauses, looking a little awkward, and looks briefly over her shoulder as if to scold the guns for drawing attention to themselves.

"I've been working with a salarian. I guess she's on a fast track for Spectre nomination herself and hunting down this insurgency with me is going to be like Eden Prime the first time was for me," Shepard says, shifting her feet restlessly. "She's quick as a whip but not very good in organized maneuvers, so I think she'll work with us just fine."

"I didn't bring my armor," Garrus says. "Not that I was in a panic or anything, but it sort of slipped my mind."

"I can hook you up," Kaidan says. Garrus doesn't doubt it. True enough, Garrus is suited up before the hour is gone. Shepard takes her chakram launcher apart and cleans the insides at least twice while waiting.

"Excellent timing," Shepard says when the door begins to whir and opens after a moment. Even the doors on the Presidium are more sophisticated. Doors in the Wards don't have anything more than basic biometric identifiers. The one leading into the room has, among other things, DNA collators, voice scans, retinal identifiers, and neural mapping.

"Nevyan Giyadas," the salarian in the doorway says. "Assuming you were wondering who I am, because I know who you are, Vakarian, sir."

"Unnecessarily polite, though," Garrus says. "I'm retired. Vakarian's fine. Vakarian, sir, is appreciated, but all you're doing is stroking my aging ego."

"Oh, I know," Giyadas says. "But it's a simple way of finding out what you prefer to be called."

"Salarian social courtesies are going to make my head hurt," Shepard says brusquely. "It would have been easier to just ask him, Giyadas."

"Yes, but then I wouldn't know how likely you are to respond to his name, Commander. Don't worry about it. You wouldn't have noticed if I wasn't being obtrusive on purpose."

"Christ," Shepard says, massaging her forehead. If this is what she's been dealing with for the last week, Garrus is surprised she doesn't have a throbbing vein as well as a headache.

"Tell us what you've got on the ships, because I know you've found something while you were gone," Shepard says. In most cases, this would sound like a threat. In this case, it's a safe assumption. Salarians make it their business to know what's going on.

"Details," Giyadas says. "The magnetic field generators are human, which was a surprise, because I didn't think humans could do much of anything that would be picked up over another option, but then I suppose there wasn't another option. I'll need to look into that. Salarian plasma weaponry, which was not a surprise, that's proprietary tech that hasn't even left homeworld labs."

"So she's been to Sur'Kesh."

"Looks like it."

"My clone went to Sur'Kesh and all I got was this lousy terrorist group," Garrus says. "How much power do their ships need? Where are they getting it?"

"Abandoned orbital stations," Shepard says. "Lot of 'em hanging around still. Weren't worth the effort of clearing them out if there was no one living there."

"The magnetic fields guide the plasma to the surface. It's all automated through the ship's computers. The little programming we've-the Commander, mostly-has scraped is like nothing I've ever seen before, it's incredibly complex," Giyadas says. Garrus isn't anything like an expert on salarian body language, but Giyadas looks like she's caught up in a revelation, like Mordin in his lab or Shepard in the field. "The field collapses on impact and the plasma detonates. It's kind of like a nuclear explosion, actually, but on a huge scale. The pyroclastic surge can burn for weeks. Look at Elysium. It's been, what, three weeks? A month? It's still burning. And the ash and debris will take decades to clear. Elysium's looking at a hundred years of impact winter, without serious terraforming efforts."

"Fascinating," Garrus says. Shepard shrugs.

"We know they need a stable power source," Shepard says. "And in any case, we've tracked them to a cell on Shanxi."

"Hilarious," Kaidan says.

"Significant colonies," Shepard says. "Like Antarius said. Eden Prime, Shanxi, Elysium, Horizon, all of Sol system, even."

"What are we talking for casualties on Elysium?" Garrus asks, morbidly curious.

"Billions," Giyadas tells him. "Nearly the entire post-war population was obliterated."

"Seems kinda funny now, that my dad thought they were batarian," Garrus says. "Not ha-ha funny, fuck-this funny."

Shepard gives him a look. She isn't disagreeing.

"Right. We're leaving in a few hours."

"Normandy?"

"Hell, yes."

* * *

Shepard in action is still a brilliant maniac, even a decade later. She's still in her physical prime, stocky and muscular, with the biotics that first made her notable after Akuze and the gleeful headlong rush into danger that made her famous. Garrus is glad to see it. The post-war Shepard would never have moved like this, even if she'd been able to stump her way into a combat zone. She hasn't Garrus' aim, but she is utterly content to bolt ahead of him into cover and sling mercenaries sky high.

Shepard goes belly behind a crate. Biotics aren't exactly like telepathy or anything, but they do give her a very fuzzy sense of how large the warehouse they're in is, and she's well practiced at turning that indistinct sixth sense into real numbers. The ceiling is vaulted-somewhat unusual for a warehouse, but then this isn't just a warehouse, and there are platforms all over the place up there. There are a few very large objects on the other side of the building, out of sight behind construction equipment and cruisers, lumbering around. There are a few dozen people as well, but their motion is faster than the big objects, making it a little harder to pin down a specific number.

She flips signs above her back: snipers, tractor-maybe-truck, soldiers, listen closely. She hasn't used standard military hand signs in probably twenty five years. She finds they don't have the kind of nuance that her brand of missions often need. When you need to know if it's a solder, a mercenary, or a husk, enemy just doesn't have the same panache. The people with her need an idea of what to expect; obviously there are enemies ahead if they're in enemy territory, but what kind of armor are they packing? Do they have the easily-jammed weapons of the really cheap mercenaries, or are they slow and unpredictably jerky like husks? Are they paramilitary, with the kind of weapons and heavy explosives that even Shepard can't take a direct hit from? Are they actual military, meaning some jurisdictional line has been crossed in the worst kind of way? Shepard hears the very soft spit of static from the back of her helmet. Garrus, acknowledging his orders, and the same from Giyadas a moment behind.

This is the first time Giyadas has gone out with Shepard, but she trusts her to have the necessary flexibility to keep up. STG isn't full of idiots. Shepard rolls to the side, hitting the edge of the crate. Garrus drops a man before he can turn at the clinking. Shepard pulls the body behind the crate with her, rolling until her back hits the wood and she's sitting partially upright. She examines his armor. It's midgrade, nondescript, with red piping very similar to Shepard's own. It's not an uncommon touch, since Shepard has the most iconic armor in the galaxy, but it only confirms what they already know.

Shepard drops the body and and returns to the edge of the crate, bellying ahead to one a few feet forward. The warehouse has a slow perimeter guard; one only passes by every twenty minutes. Shepard clicks her tongue. Sloppy. She'd expected better from her clone.

Getting in isn't difficult. There's a good three hundred feet of warehouse before there's any kind of choke point, all of it littered with decent cover and poorly armed mercenaries. Shepard swings herself up into the riggings of a half-assembled zero grav crane. She goes stiff with shock, and the only thing that keeps her from falling is the rigging.

There are six brutes wandering around the other side of the warehouse, nervous looking humans darting around underneath them. No wonder the warehouse is understaffed.

Shepard reaches behind her back and very slowly, she begins to form signs she hasn't needed in more than a decade. Reaper-brute-six-caution-prepare to move-fire at will. The acknowledgement static is much longer coming this time. As the shock clears, Shepard's nerves start to frazzle. It's a battlefield, which is nothing new, and she at least has Garrus, but Nevyan Giyadas was born fifteen years too late to have any idea what to do with Reaper forces. Shepard can only continue to trust that she's flexible enough to keep up. She thinks maybe she should have brought Kaidan instead.

She lights up a warp bubble as Giyadas begins shooting. When Giyadas had insisted on bringing a grenade launcher as large as she was, Shepard had balked, but now Shepard's glad Giyadas had a fit. She doesn't know what else Giyadas could bring to bear against a brute otherwise.

"Jump to one side if any of them charge at you," Shepard snaps over the comm. There's no time for signals, and their cover is blown. She sets up a singularity and launches a warp at it, sending two brutes reeling at the explosion. "Brutes move in a straight line."

"Got it!"

Shepard fires off a shockwave, rolling to the side, and ends up pinned against the crane staring down three brutes.

"Any minute now, darling!"

She hears acknowledgement static and then the tiny head of the nearest brute explodes. She whips three lift grenades at the next, and by then the third is too close for much of anything but trying not to be knocked aside. Shepard makes a valiant attempt, but she winds up winded on her back, groping for her pistol. The brute slams its knuckles down on either side of Shepard. She fishes harder for her pistol, hands gone shaky, and pries it off her leg. The brute screams and knocks it away.

"Shit," she says faintly, staring up at it. Her biotics sputter like a dying lighter and then she tears it apart with the strongest warp she's ever produced. Dizzy and suddenly starving, she twists onto her stomach, searching for Giyadas. Giyadas looks like she's having the time of her life, firing downwards off of a brute's corpse into a cluster of scientists. Shepard swears she can hear manic laughter. A woman after her own heart, that salarian. Garrus starts his mop up. Shepard pushes herself up onto hands and knees, then up onto hands and feet, fighting through physical therapy flashbacks. She surges fully upright, staggering forward, and stands in place like the biggest idiot in naval history until Giyadas bolts to her side.

"Look at that, Commander," Giyadas says. "I think we just experienced hell."

"You have no idea," Shepard says, continuing her search for granola bars. She knows there's a few in her armor. Biotics have ridiculous caloric needs and they need to be spare in a hot combat zone. It's been drilled into her since basic and then she still went and pulled that idiot warp stunt when Garrus no doubt was lining up the shot. She digs one out of her weapons webbing, tears off the wrapper, and devours it in about half a second. Her head stabilizes after a minute. She eats another just to be safe.

"Shepard," Garrus says, putting his hand on her shoulder. She looks back at him.

"I know," she says. They nod at each other. Time to get to it.

Shepard leads the way around the bodies-mostly human, but an asari here and there-and up the narrow flight of stairs at the very back of the warehouse. There's an overseers office at the end of the hallway where, predictably, Shepard's clone is sprawled lazily across an office chair. The clone whirls a few pens through the air with her biotics and leans forward to rest her elbows on her knees.

" I go by Noreen these days," the clone says, sounding faintly amused. Shepard frowns. She honestly doesn't think it will ever not be strange hearing her own voice, her own tones. She's no doubt the clone knew what she was thinking. They're not entirely the same, after all, but there's certainly plenty in common.

"Reaper forces?" Shepard demands. Garrus stands at Shepard's six. Giyadas moves to block the doorway, swinging her enormous grenade launcher up to her shoulder.

"It's for our new stage production."

Shepard wants to knock the wry smirk off the clone's face with her forehead.

"You're honestly going to try and tell me that the terrorists we spent the past two weeks chasing from the Citadel to here were in fact just some actors practicing for their new play?"

"Well, yes, ma'am, I suppose I am."

Shepard swears the clone is leering at her. She's not going to rise to the bait. She lines up a shaky singularity, then deep-sixes it, muttering. Still too dizzy to risk any biotics, even the non-flashy kind. The clone's grin grows.

"You really have no idea what you're stepping to, do you?" she asks. "You still think this is just about me glassing some planets. Think about it, Nora. Who would you be without all your rules? What are you capable of?"

Shepard's grip on her temper, already on rocky ground from repeated Reaper force knocks and low blood sugar, goes completely slack. She charges across the room and headbutts the clone.

"I think Wrex felt that one," Garrus says. His voice is muffled by the helmet, but Shepard can hear his amusement. She staggers around for a second, knocked for a loop.

"Call for pickup," she says shakily. "I need to go throw up."

* * *

Shepard spends most of the shuttle flight back to the Citadel with her head between her knees. Garrus keeps his hand on her shoulder and makes comforting noises, but she knows he's still deeply amused that she almost knocked herself out headbutting her clone. She doesn't say anything. Shepard's making notes of all the things that don't fit: it was far too easy to find the clone, the warehouse's suspiciously helpful setup, the clone came easy by Shepard's standards, brutes in a warehouse almost twenty years after the war. She doesn't know how to match any of these puzzle pieces to the planetary glassing, or to all of the connections the clone would need to pull any of it off. Quarian techs, proprietary salarian technology, human ships, Reaper forces: her head starts to spin again, worse than before. Trying to puzzle it out with a vicious concussion isn't going to help.

Who is Shepard without all of her rules? She has had, her entire life, responsibility and ethics and duty drilled into her. She is a soldier all the way down, and she's well aware that she's unmatched by any other human being in existence. There was no one else who could have pulled off the Reaper war the way that she did, and the idea of that kind of potential-that force, that drive, that charm and courage-unbounded by Shepard's morality is terrifying to comprehend.

* * *

The kids are waiting at terminal, all four of them. Jas is blissfully asleep on Grunt's shoulder, slung across his upper body in a fireman's hold. Henry, for a pleasant change of pace, is on his feet, and Vahan is peacefully dozing in his carrier. Some part of Shepard cracks in relief, and under the concussion and the bruising and the metabolic spike, the warrior settles back to sleep. Shepard lifts Henry to her chest, tucking her nose into his hair, and breathing in his baby smell.

"Hey, guys," she says. Garrus presses his forehead briefly to hers, and then sets to the business of corralling several very sleepy people into Kaidan's skycar.

"What went on?" Kaidan asks, looking up into the rearview to see Shepard.

"Nothing much," she says. She leans over, sighing deeply, and rests her head against Garrus. He hands her a granola bar. She eats the granola bar. "Debrief later. I need a nap. Half hour."

"Yeah, we'll see."

She ends up sleeping for most of the next twenty-seven hours, with most of the family tucked in bed as well. Even Vahan gives up chewing long enough to sleep on Shepard's belly for a few hours. When she wakes up, the world is still rocking, and Kaidan is nowhere to be found for a debrief. That's alright. She wants to spend some time with her kids. They're growing real fast these days.

Henry is yowling again, snapping his flat little teeth into Grunt's arm and screaming his displeasure when Grunt doesn't start bleeding. Jas plucks at Shepard's shirt, struggling to be heard over the baby, until Shepard takes Henry and settles him on her hip.

"Henry wants to be you, mama," Jas says insistently. "I got to first and then you come home so he didn't get to."

Shepard gives Grunt a long, measuring look. A krogan would know something about not fitting, she thinks, about being an aimless and furious piece in a poorly shaped puzzle. Small Henry, who has never found a part of the world that doesn't make him miserable, might even at his age find something in common with that. She nods, swinging her old N7 helmet off the shelf with one hand and offering it to the toddler on her hip. God bless Kaidan's sentimentality.

"Want to wear mama's helmet, badass?" she asks him.

"Yeah," he says indistinctly. "Plee."

"Here we go," she says, setting him on his feet, waiting till he catches his balance, then settling the helmet over his head. It tips backwards, bringing the nosepiece up under his eyes, so that all she can see is blue eyes and a tiny fringe of red hair. Henry staggers around to face Grunt, grasping at the helmet to bring it down, and charges. He belts out a yowl in his reedy little baby voice, thocking his helmet against Grunt's forehead, wobbling, and falling flat on his ass.

It takes an effort, but Shepard doesn't yank Henry back to his feet. She watches him struggle for a few moments, grunting and kicking his legs like a grounded beetle, before he rolls over, adroitly shoves the helmet off, and gets to his feet. This is the first time she's ever seen Henry get up by himself; is it the last surgery, or is he thinking like a krogan? Shepard suspects she'll never know. Grunt swings him up, chuckling boisterously though Henry doesn't shriek with laughter like Jas would. Henry hangs from Grunt's grip, staring him dead in the eyes, and bares his teeth.

"Take a bite out of me, would you?" Grunt demands. Henry widens his mouth further. It almost looks like a smile.

"Yeah," he says.

"Looks like you didn't hatch a bunch of turians after all, Shepard," Grunt says, sounding satisfied.

"Humans don't actually hatch, Grunt," she says, stepping around to clap him on the shoulder. "We burst fully formed from our mothers in a froth of blood and screaming."

"I'm not impressed."

Shepard can't help laughing. It's been a difficult few months, but some things never change.

"Hear that, squirt?" Grunt says to Henry. It's mild, compared to some of the things Shepard has heard Grunt call even the humans he likes. "I'm the older brother. I get to tell you what to do."

"Go easy on him," Shepard says. "He's not even big enough to lift a gallon of milk. Let him learn a few more words, too."

"So only one hundred miles to start with," Grunt says, tucking Henry under his arm like a football. Henry bursts into gales of laughter and Shepard's heart lightens some.


End file.
